That doesn’t mean that you can’t emulate the success of online stores like Finish Line and 6PM. What it does mean, though, is that you’re going to have to get creative when trying to bring people onto your website to purchase and to actually get them to make the purchase.

Whenever I work with an online retailer to help them grow their business, the very first thing that I do is check to see if they are collecting people’s emails in some shape or form. The reason I do this is because, fundamentally, the email is the most intimate way in which a business can interact with their current customers and potential customers.

Therefore, if you are not already collecting people’s emails, you should be. And this tip is regardless of the size of your business. You can have only one product for sale or you can have ten thousand products for sale. If you are trying to sell something to your visitors and get them to open their wallets, you need to have some sort of an email collecting system in place.

Here’s the reason…

If you are collecting emails, you are getting into people’s inboxes. Therefore, when they check their phone; check, your email shows. When they open up their email on their desktop; check, your email shows. Look on a tablet; check, your email shows. In other words, the email that they are checking, your company is going to show and that’s important.

Another reason is the simple fact that one’s email is very intimate. We tend to trust, just a little bit more, what flows into our inbox. So, if a company says something, we’re more inclined to believe it than if we see it on a social network or something along those lines.

Okay, that’s great, but the title I said above was how discounts and email marketing can increase revenue.

And the secret to that is to give away the discount in the email. Here’s how.

During the year leading up to the big holiday season, send out emails that are informative. If you run a clothing retail store, send out a monthly or bi-weekly email that talks about the dos and don’ts of fashion. White socks should not go with black dress pants, right? Maybe talk about what’s trending right now with an unforced link to your offerings. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you’re sending them information on a predetermined schedule that they find useful.

The reason you do this is to build their trust. Remember how we talked about the inbox being intimate? Well, by interacting with them via email over a long period of time, you can increase that level of intimacy. And you’ll do so over months and months until the time comes, right around October and November, where you pull the trigger.

Send out an email saying that you’re going to be having a great sale coming up. Ask your visitors to retweet and share on Facebook the fact that the sale is coming up. Some might, some might not. But, you want to use these subscribers to start getting interest to the site. And, if they do retweet and share, more people will know and more people might subscribe to the newsletter.

The day before the sale, send an email reminding everyone that there is a sale the next day (and talk about the sale a bit). Tell them that you’ll be giving them a killer coupon and that they’re going to love it.

And finally, the morning of the sale, email the coupon out. At this point, you would have created a lot of buzz and people, if they trust you (which they should since you’ve been building rapport by sending out those emails monthly), they are going to purchase.

Email marketing is a fantastic tool to engage with your customers. And, by using it to get coupons out and build buzz, you can quickly increase the profitability of your business this holiday season. The best part is, each year, you can keep building your list and it’ll just turn into more and more money for you.

Jay is an Internet marketer who helps smaller companies try and emulate the success of companies like Finish Line and 6PM with their own online stores. By using coupons and discounts, even small e-commerce sites can succeed. He runs a coupon website that offers the finishline.com discount code and the free shipping 6pm coupon code.

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This is a guest post by Justin from The Uncommon Life. Interested in writing for StandOutBlogger?

There are no secrets on how to rank high with the major search engines because effective search engine optimizations are now immense. What is search engine optimization? Before we discuss that thing, you have to understand first how search engines work and a bit of know-how.

Search engines are into providing their users with the most relevant and up-to-date information to match the search term that was used.

They are sophisticated pieces of technology which allow users to quickly find relevant websites by searching for a word or a phrase. Search engine results are useless to users if the information doesn’t relate to the search term, or if the results are old. People expect the most up-to-date and fresh information that is useful to them.

Updating your website everyday and adding some materials will help you get noticed by the search engines. So, if you are going to sell any type of product or service online, you have to optimize your website for the search engines, in order to boost traffic and sales. It is because over 90% of your business will likely come directly from search engine results. And for that reason, it is absolutely important to optimize your site for search engines for you to have the greatest deals in the entire world.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process by which webmasters or online business owners utilize strategic copy to augment their website’s status. It is certain that the internet has grown so fast over the years and the competition for the best search engine position has created an enormous market. Therefore, better understanding the fundamental elements of Search Engine Optimization is vital for an online business’ success.

Making use of effective search engine optimization techniques will improve the page rank of your website. There are many tricks that can be used to increase page rank; the most effective method is to provide high quality content consistently. This seems like a simple concept but there are many websites that fails to provide content that visitors find interesting. Sites which provide content that are interesting, well-written and regularly updated create highly engaged visitors who are more likely to return to the website in the coming days. So, if you can set your website apart from those boring, lifeless sites then do it. You’ll surely have a step closer to achieving high page rank through search engine optimization.

The next significant factor for an effective search engine optimization is to include keywords and phrases within your content. To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you have to make sure that the keywords and phrases you have on your site are the keywords and phrase that your site is actually optimized for. The more keywords you use in your content, the more likely it is that online visitors will find your site when they do some research with those words. If you are unfailing with these techniques, then your overall search engine optimization will increase, boosting your page rank.

You should also develop a linking strategy as a part of your search engine optimization. Not only does this provide free advertising for your site, but it makes the impression that your site is imperative because of its affiliated links. For each link that you have pointing back to you, that is another chance for your potential customer to find you. The more inbound links that you have pointing to your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines.

Another is to develop a content stratagem. People who get to search from the internet are looking for information. The more information you provide for them and the more helpful it is, the more likely you will make the sale. Writing articles is the most effective way to build up content for your site. When writing articles to post on your site, make sure that you develop a clear means of arranging their content. You can do this by simply adding a new page to your site. This will allow room for extra articles to be added as you write them, and will allow you to build up an archive of articles which will maintain to draw online visitors. Make sure also that you have included your archived articles in a directory that is next to the root web of your site so that the search engines will catalog your online articles.

Always keep in mind that search engine optimization methods are important in developing your site’s status. With that thing in mind, make sure that you write high-quality, keyword rich content and link your site to and from a deliberate family of other sites. These things will help improve your site’s popularity and coerce increased business through your online business.

Justin helps people find their passion and live life on their terms. He has created a free resource to show you how to set up a blog  in 30 min or less. For more on Justin go to theuncommmonlife.net.

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We aside from heading away to Rainbow Beach for 5 days with my little family, I have been getting started on my first new niche site and I can reveal a little information about the niche I am targeting as well as the work I have done and the results I have achieved so far.

So Whats The Niche?

Now I’m not giving away the keywords I am targeting or even the exact niche I am targeting, but I can tell you three things that will give you a bit of an idea:

• I Will Be Targeting Australian Search Traffic (so .com.au or .net.au domains)
• All 4 Niche Sites Are In The Same Broad Niche (to allow networking)
• The Broad Niche Is Something To Do With ‘Health & Well Being’

Definitely a niche that I have never been in before but I am excited to see how these sites grow because it is definitely a ‘buyer’s niche‘.

How Has The Site Progressed?

Well the first site is definitely taking shape. After installing WordPress and my selection of current favourite plugins, I added my heavily customised versions of the fThemes Incorporate theme.

The next thing I did was do some more in depth keyword research using Market Samurai, and picked out about 10 extra keywords related to my niche topic and then hit up my article writer (read: How To Hire An Article Writer).

She is a fantastic writer and well priced, but as expected it takes her about 4 days to get my 10 articles back to me, so I decided to write a couple up myself.

Now, I knew nothing about the niche, so I spent a couple of hours researching what it was all about, to get a good understanding and wrote the content for the homepage, an extra page and a blog post (3 pages in total). And after that I wrote and submitted an article to an article directory just to get the indexing process start.

This is time when I went away for 5 days with no internet access, so I had no idea what to expect when I came home – but I was pleasantly surprised!

Not only had a couple of my pages been indexed, but my main keyword was ranking 16 in Google.com.au already!

How I Use My Outsourced Articles

When I got home, I was happy to receive the articles that I had got my writer to create for me and I wanted to share how I personally use them.

1. As Pages/Posts For My Niche Site
   I can’t write all the content myself so I always outsource the topics that I really don’t have an interest in or understanding of. I will probably use about 3-4 of the 10 articles on my site.
2. As Guest Posts On Other Blogs
   I definitely focus on quality over content for my backlinks. I’d rather have 5-10 backlinks on quality websites than 500 spammy, weak backlinks. Guest posting seems to provide very solid backlinks for me, so I have already had two accepted and will probably submit one more from this list of articles.
3. Submit Them To Article Directories
   Your link building strategy definitely needs to have diversity, and this is why I still submit to article directories and Web 2.0 websites (such as HubPages and Squidoo). I don’t worry about do-follow and no-follow, instead I try to create a natural spread of backlinks.

 What About The Results?

Google Rankings

No I already told you that I have a couple of pages index and the main keyword ranking quite well, but let’s look at some screenshots (with keywords blanked) to show you exactly how I am doing.

I still got a couple of posts that haven’t got indexed, but so far so good. Oh, and the orange ‘D:’ for those of you who don’t use Market Samurai, means that the keyword is in the domain – which just means the right pages are ranking for each keyword (not just tags etc).

Search Engine Traffic

Now while I cannot boast a flood of search engine traffic, I can happily announce that the trickle has started.

2 are for keywords I wasn’t actually targeting, but one was for keyword 4 above.

What About Monetisation?

Now I know Adsense has played a huge part in most of my niche sites so far, but for this site I don’t think I will use it. There are plenty of great products to promote and I really want to make my Clickbank checks a little more consistent.

I’ve added a Clickbank text adblock (that looks like an Adsense text ad), as well as a couple of image ads promoting Clickbank products and also testing a product on MarketHealth to see if it actually converts.

What Do I Think?

Definitely a promising start, and hopefully when the guest post links kick in I will see the rest of my pages indexed and some improved rankings. My goal at the moment is to add 2-3 new articles a week for the next couple of weeks as well as a couple more guest posts and articles. I’d like to see it hit 100 search visitors in September, which is button for my to start working on my second niche site of this challenge. Oh, and one commission would be a good start :)

Any thoughts? Comment below!

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Who Is CheckMyStats?

CheckMyStats is one of Australia’s leading affiliate networks, and before you instantly turn off because you are not Australian, they host a large range of affiliate offers for Australia, US and UK markets as well as other offers for a worldwide audience.

Currently with over 180 different offers for you to promote, their focus in on CPA leads, where you get paid for each person you refer who signs up for an offer.

The benefit for US affiliates in promoting offers from CheckMyStats is the strong Australian dollar (which means extra money in your pocket when it get’s converted into US$.

How I Use CheckMyStats

Currently I use CheckMyStats almost exclusively for my online surveys for money site.

If you have been following my niche site challenge, then you will have seen me mention this CPA affiliate network and seen my monthly income increasing from them each month.

Starting with $35 in November 2010, last month in May 2011 I made $210 through CheckMyStats.

This is solely through banner ads and within-post links. (You will notice the my site now has an email list – I have been using a different affiliate network for the list to compare conversion).

What Type Of Offers Do They Have?

As I mentioned earlier, there focus is in CPA offers, but they do have a few %/sale and CPC offers as well.

A few of the popular types of offers are:

• Paid Survey Companies
• Freebies
• Daily Deal Sites

I would estimate that about 60%+ of their offers would be able to be categorised in one of the above categories (all seem to offer $0.50 and $3.50/lead), but they do also have dating, betting, accommodation and a large range of other offers.

What About Payments?

When I first started using CheckMyStats each month I would receive a hand written check (which was a nice feel), but a couple of months ago I was asked if I could get paid via Paypal – which is how I have been paid for the last couple of months.

Their website states that they pay via Check, Direct Deposit or Paypal, but for international affiliates I am guessing Paypal would be the best option.

They pay on the 20th of each month (as long as your affiliate balance is over $50 (on a max 30 day term).

And here is something that I like:

Payment Assurance – We ensure Merchants place a deposit into their account so you receive commission payments in a timely manner.

My Final Thoughts On CheckMyStats…

My experience with them has honestly been fantastic. It is not one of my biggest earners, but they always pay on time and their communication is fantastic.

They constantly are sending my updates on the latest offers and rate increases, and whenever something is happening with an offer I am promoting (such as it being pulled), I always get an email letting me know.

So if you are looking for a CPA network then I do recommend you check out CheckMyStats and at least see if they have any offers suited towards your sites.

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Aside from buying a new niche site (which is still to make me money), I’ve been focusing on link build and more specifically writing articles and my EzineArticles account has a backlog of 10 articles to be approved (a few for each niche site).

Now I know a lot of people struggle with even the thought of coming up with article ideas, so today I wanted to show you a free website tool (no download, no signup, no nothing), that will leave you with article titles coming out of your ears!

Now I used to use Market Samurai for finding article titles (but that can be a little bit cumbersome – which can stifle the creative flow), so what I do now is use Market Samurai for finding keywords for my niche blogs content creation and then use those same keywords and this great online tool to find the exact questions that people are asking regarding those keywords.

Introducing Keyword Questions – By WordTracker Labs

• Keyword Questions (Link to website)

What I want to do now is take you through the simple process, step-by-step and show you how you can quickly come up with 50+ article titles based around one simple keyword.

Initial Overview

So this is the basic layout of the Keyword Questions – super simple.

Step 1: Type In Keyword

Obviously the first thing you want to do is type in the keyword of the topic you are looking to write about.

Now obviously the more words you add the less results you will get. In this example I am using the broad niche of my cruise deals site, and if I was writing articles to build links for specific pages of that site I would type in the keyword for that page. But let’s use the broad niche as it will give us the most results.

Hit ‘search’ and let’s see what results we get.

Step 2: Get Your Article Titles

See I told you it was an easy process. Let’s have a look at the article titles that we now have.

As you can see at the bottom of the above image, we got 100 possible article titles for me to start writing about.

As you can tell by the first result, you will have to remove a few of them – but how handy is it to know the questions that people are asking around your niche (instead of just guessing).

But Isn’t Article Marketing Dead?

Now I know a lot of your might be thinking, ‘but I thought the search engines didn’t put as much weight on article directories anymore?’

Well whatever you believe, the testing that I’ve been doing seems to show me that:

That maybe the traditional form of article marketing is dead. You just have to be creative about your strategy and find what works for you.

Here Is A Few Article Marketing Keys I Have Learnt

• Get The Most Out Of Each Article

  Writing an article can take a lot of time, unless you outsource with oDesk. Either way, you want to make sure that you get the most out of each article. Now you can’t just go and submit the same article to a heap of different places (well you can, but the results won’t be fantastic). So I recommend spinning each article (I use Spinz.me – FREE), which will allow you to turn one single article into 100′s of variations – which you can submit to different locations.

• Explore New Methods

  There are now only a couple of article directories that really matter, so the work now is in finding new places to distribute our content. Now you can use versions of your article on Web 2.0 platforms like WordPress.com, Blogger etc, or the method I prefer is ‘Blog Distribution Networks’, such as Free Traffic System or ArticleRanks. I personally prefer ArticleRanks because they seem to have a higher quality of blogs.

• Get Your Articles Indexed

  However, the most important thing is that nothing matters if your articles are not getting indexed. This is the part I never actually thought about until recently. Lately I have been using Pingomatic each time I get a trackback from one of these articles – but I am considering purchasing Pingback Optimizer, which is a WordPress plugin that basically assists your articles in getting indexed by Google.

Over To You..

I want to know what you think.

What are your thoughts on the Keyword Question site, or even article marketing in general? I would love to hear your thoughts below!

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There is now a little magnifying glass next to each search result and when you click on it, it gives you a preview of the page before you actually visit it.

While I can see it being quite handy on occasions, the people who will potentially be affected most are people who are creating websites that are focused on conversion (be that Adsense, Clickbank, Aweber or whatever your method) – because people can click on the magnifying glass, see that they are going to get sold to and then move on to the search result below.

I personally think the biggest losers are the people who have a strong Adsense presence or a high ‘ad to content ratio’.

To be completely honest, this has forced me to look at some of my dormant niche sites and see if it is time to give some of them a revamp.

Take this one for example:

This website is niche blog 3 in my sidebar (for those playing at home), and has made me about $10 so far this month. But a few things stood out to me when I saw this:

1. A Lot Of Ad’s Didn’t Show

   This is good in a way, but how boring does it make it look!

2. Looks Like It Is From 1995

   This blog really doesn’t look that bad when you visit it, but in the preview it looks cheap and tacky (and more importantly, not very credible).

3. Looks Like It Was Made To Make Money

   Now while making money from your blogs isn’t a bad thing. People visit your site for the content and obviously they would like to think that that would be the most important thing. And at the moment it doesn’t look like content is that important.

Does That Mean We All Need To Revamp Our Niche Blogs?

If your niche blogs are looking like mine, then I really don’t think that it is essential to make them look pretty. At the moment, I don’t think that many people (except the tech savvy) even know about it – and it is not automatic. I think that if it were to be automatic each time to place your mouse over a result, then maybe I would  consider it more important.

That being said, I have seen a lot of room for improvement – in fact this has been quite an eye-opener.

So this blog is going to get a revamp, some renewed focus and an email list (using Pop Up Domination), as I see if I can turn this flailing niche blog into a $100/month+ source of passive income!

Stay tuned for a niche blog renovation overview to come, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new search preview for Google.

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Well I am happy to announce that it is finally finished and came in at just over 1 hour of quality teaching – and if you did not happen to take advantage of my ‘how to get it free’ offer, then you really need to take advantage of this introductory special offer!

Video Preview

For This Week Only….

As promised I have just put Cheap Link Building Exposed up on Fiverr at an introductory price of $5.

Now you are not going to want to miss out on this, because I am currently working on the sales page and the pricing structure – and I promise that it is going to be significantly higher starting next week!

>> Cheap Link Building Exposed On Fiver <<

(Expires Sunday 10th October!)

What Is Cheap Link Building Exposed?

I have written a couple of posts in the last year on how I outsource link building for under $2/hr and while I go into the basics on how to do it in the post a lot of people have been commenting and emailing me asking for more information.

This product is my response, and includes:

1. Over 1/hr Of Case Study Footage
   Watch as I go through the whole process of hiring a new link builder from start to finish!
2. My Proven Templates
   The job description and interviews are integral in making sure that you not only get cheap link builders, but also quality. I have tested and perfected my templates and you are able to steal them for yourself!

Sound good? Let Me Share You My Case Study Results!

1. 55 Job Applicants

2. I Got One Applicant To Lower Her Price By Over 20%

3. My New Link Builder Did Over 200 Links In A 5 Hour Trial

Plus My Secret Way To:

• Save $100′s In Initial Outlay

• Get Applicants Under $2/hr When The oDesk Minimum is $3/hr

• Instantly Cull The Majority Of Applicants

• Test Long Term Link Builders Before Committing

If you are creating niche sites or just looking to build search engine traffic to your blog or website – then Cheap Link Building Exposed will save you thousands of dollars in trial and error, and share with you my secret link building strategy!

Make sure you grab this on Fiverr for just $5 because I am currently looking at a price tag of more that 400% of that – and it is worth much more!

>> Cheap Link Building Exposed On Fiverr <<

(Expires Sunday 10th October!)

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**UPDATE:**

For this week only, you can grab Cheap Link Building Exposed for just $5 on Fiverr.com

>> Cheap Link Building Exposed On Fiver <<

What Is ‘Cheap Link Building Exposed’?

This video is a result of emails and messages that I have received in relation to my multiple posts on link building strategies. In fact on another of my blogs I shared how I had hired an on-going link builder for just 83cents an hour.

A lot of people asked for the how’s and why’s in more details – and I even had a few people accusing me of lying!

Cheap Link Building Exposed is my response – and something that I think you will absolutely love.

What You Will Receive:

1. Follow-Me Screencast

   Watch me as I use oDesk to find, select and hire a link builder for under $2.hr. Listen as I explain the common mistakes that most first time outsourcers make, and see the finished work of my new employee! I currently have over 50minutes of footage (so there will be well over 1hour of content).

2. My Exact Templates

   Communication is the key to finding the right workers. I share my proven ‘job descriptions’, ‘interviews’ and a special bonus that shares how I get workers to lower their price even further!

And In It You Will Learn:

• How I Cull The Majority Of Applicants Instantly!

• The Exact Copy I Use That Saves Me $100′s  (this is gold!)

• How I Get People To Record The Links They Build (accountability)

• How I Test Workers Out Before Hiring Them On An Ongoing Basis!

How Do I Get Cheap Link Building Exposed?

As I mentioned earlier, this product is premium and because of that there will be just 3 ways you can receive it:

1. Sign Up For My Success Blogging Course

   If you sign up for my email course BEFORE I finish production of this product – you will get it for free! I love my subscribers and this is a way I can show my appreciation.

2. Catch The Fiverr Introduction Special

   For the first week of Cheap Link Building Exposed’s life, I will be putting it up on Fiverr. That means you will be able to grab this whole package for just $5 – but don’t take too long, because after the first week it will be removed from Fiverr and the regular price will start!

3. Buy It At Full Price For $10 After Launch

   After the weeks launch special I will start selling it through E-Junkie or PayPal with a price of $10. It will stay at this price until I start adding even more content!

How Will It Be Delivered?

The content will be split up into smaller videos and be available through a premium page of StandOutBlogger. Once you purchase you will be given login in details to the videos and additional downloads.

When Will It Be Available?

As of this post I am just about to select one of the 4 workers (that I have short listed from 56 applicants!), so this product will be ready as soon as they have delivered their first work and I have edited the content. My guess would be the middle of next week – but sign up now so you don’t miss out and have to pay!

If you are looking to create passive income with niche sites or even just consistent search traffic to your blog then this cheap link building strategy is something that you will really want to consider.

>> Cheap Link Building Exposed On Fiver <<

Want to jump the gun, sign up for a free oDesk account and start looking around today – and grab my free ebook on GeoArbitrage!

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FranchiseBuzz is an Australian blog that I started late last year, worked for a couple of months and it grabbed some nice search positions and hasn’t had a new post in a couple of months – yet it has still be bringing in consistent income on a monthly basis.

Now since about February it is comfortably been making about $100 a month through Google Adsense. I had a very ugly theme with a lot of ad’s – but it was converting well.

$100 was nice, but at less than 5% of my total online income – I wanted more.

What I Did To Increase Blog Profit By 50%

1. Changed from the BlueSense WordPress theme to a much cleaner Librio theme (which was inspired by Mac OS X Leopard).

2. Placed a simple Clickbank review at the top and bottom of each post.

I spent a lot of time browsing the Clickbank marketplace to find what I thought would be the perfect product for the target audience and seems I was right with 4 sales in the last month.

So one month on from implimenting these simple changes this blog is now making:

• Adsense: $61
• Clickbank: $103

I just wanted to show why we need to be constantly be tweaking our blogs for maximum profit! There is still more tweaking to be done with this blog but I am happy with a $150 a month for a blog that I don’t post to any more.

Question:

What simple things have you implemented on your blog to see a great result?

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The conversion rates that I have been able to achieve are like nothing I have ever seen in an affiliate program.

This month so far:

50% of impressions   —> Sign up for trial

84% of signups —> Download trial software

60% of downloads —> Purchase  (48% commission)

Pretty amazing right? This is why I am sad that they are opening up the Market Samurai affiliate program, but my loss is your gain!

To be eligible for an affiliate account you must have purchased a copy of Market Samurai. This is because they are looking for long term affiliates who have actually used and can personally recommend the software. If you don’t own Market Samurai, make sure you purchase a copy ( a 35% discount is built into the trial so you can get it for just $97 once off).

Market Samurai Affiliate Program Launch

If you are already an owner of Market Samurai then you may have already gotten an email, but if you purchase now you will receive emails over the next day or two about the affiliate program launch, but let me just say that there are some pretty nice prizes up for grab!

They got, iPhones and iPads on offer and you don’t have to be a ‘top 10′ affiliate. Instead these prizes will be ‘unlocked’ as you hit certain targets.

So What Do You Do If You Want To Join The Market Samurai Affiliate Program?

1. If You Already Own Market Samurai –>> Check Your Emails For More Information

2. If You Don’t Own Market Samurai –>> Sign up for the trial of the software and purchase. Get to know the product so that when it launches the affiliate program on Monday you can really recommend the product to your blog and list.

Let me know if you jump on board, and best of luck with the launch promotion!

Download a free trial of Market Samurai the product that I use to find and rank my niche sites!

Considering the feedback that I received from my cheap article writers post, I am covering my face with my hands in anticipation for the tomatoes – but here goes.

I have been reading Timothy Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek‘ and one of the key things he talks about in the book is AUTOMATION and OUTSOURCING.

So I took at a look at the jobs I was doing for my websites to see what some of the tasks where that I could get other people to do to free my time and I thought ‘why not outsource link building?‘

Why Would I Outsource Link Building?

For my niche blogs my main goal is search engine traffic, because once I set it up and am ranking well I don’t have to worry about blog commenting, tweeting, or working hard to continually get new visitors.

But that means I have to spend a lot of time building the links back to my sites and in all honesty, it’s not all hard work  – it’s just very tedious and time consuming (and they are the perfect type of jobs to outsource). So I guess it is quite obvious why I would want to outsource link building.

Where Do You Find Cheap Link Builders?

Since I had such a great experience with oDesk with my seo article writers test, I had no reason not to use them again to outsource my link building.

On oDesk I put in a assignment for:

Link Builder for 10 hours  a week – with the opportunity to increase to full-time depending on results.

Nothing fancy, and I put the hourly rate to under $3/hr. (I know that sounds cheap, and to be honest I wasn’t expecting that many responses).

I Got Over 50 Job Applications!!

I couldn’t believe that there were that many people (most seem qualified) that were willing to work for under $3/hr – I actually got one offer at 57cents/hour!

Now I am not saying that all of these will be good at link building, that is why you ask for information and interview them prior to hiring them – but if they can prove they know what they are doing and are willing to work for the price you ask – then why wouldn’t you outsource link building to them?

I see this as another great opportunity to automate my online business and for a maximum of $30 a week to test this strategy – I would be silly not to try it. I will let you know my results!

Why not try oDesk to outsource link building for yourself? Start an assignment and see what type of job applications that you personally get!

Download a free trial of Market Samurai the product that I use to find and rank my niche sites!

I’ve been focusing quite a bit lately on two topics on this blog – Market Samurai and ‘cheap article writers‘.

The reason I have been doing this is because these two tools are really all that you need to create a fantastic, profitable niche blog. On the one hand if you buy Market Samurai you have probably the most advanced keyword research tool (Market Samurai review) that will not only allow you to analyze topics to find highly targeted, money making niches ( my indoor dog kennels site is already starting to get Google traffic and Adsense dollars!)

But What If You Find A Profitable Niche You Have No Knowledge In?

This is exactly what happened to me. I found a fantastic niche that I saw had a handful of keywords with niche search traffic, and not to difficult competition (I knew with a little work I could get front page of Google) – but the problem was that they keywords had to do with dogs….and I don’t really like dogs. To be quite honest, they kinda scare me. So the fact that the niche was to do with extra large dogs – I had even less interest.

But It Was A Profitable Niche!

So I bought a great keyword domain and started writing my first article – but was failing miserably. I don’t know about you, but I cannot write about what I am not passionate about. So I needed to find someone who was. But since I was only testing the niche at the time – I needed cheap article writers!

But Where Do You Find Cheap Article Writers?

I was willing to pay up to $5 an article because I knew that was about the price that they were going for if I went to the DigitalPoint marketplace, but if you have ready my SEO article writers post, you would know that I took a completely different route.

The best way to get the cheapest article writers is to get the writers bidding against each other for your business and that is exactly what I did.

If you have never heard of oDesk, you need to head over there and sign up to their freelancing website.

What Is oDesk And How Can I Help Me Get Cheap Article Writers?

oDesk is an online services marketplace that has freelancers performing over $6 million of work a month.

It is totally free to join and as soon as you have registered you will have access to 1,000′s of writers, designers, programmers and many other services that will help you focus your efforts on other parts of your online business.

All you have to do is post a job, if you are looking for cheap article writers then you will obviously post a job in the article section – you set the maximum price and then just wait for the writers to start bidding for your work.

You will get a range of expensive and cheap article writers, quality writers and not so professional writers. The good thing about oDesk is that before you have to decide which SEO article writer you will give your job to, you can view their resume and application, check out their previous work rating and contact them for a further interview.

What’s This About $1.60 Articles?

As I said earlier, I was more than happy to pay up to $5 an article but after seeing a couple of people posting writing jobs on  oDesk for about $2 an article I decided to put that as my maximum price ($20 for 10 articles or $2 each), but as the applicants came in I started to see people offering less to try and gain my job.

You have to be careful when you are selecting candidates that English is their first language. But you can set this as a requirement in the job description.

)ne lady’s application caught my attention, because she was American (so English was her first language), she had and loved dogs, her sample articles were fantastic (extremely personal writing style) and her bid on the job was just $1.60 per article!

I made the decision to approve her application, sent through the keywords that I wanted articles written for and as they say, the rest is history.

So, I guess the whole point of this article was to show you that creating a niche website doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money. For me it took some keyword research using Market Samurai, and hiring cheap article writers to create my content for me. Now all I have left to do is perfect my monetization strategies and do a bit of link building!

Download a free trial of Market Samurai the product that I use to find and rank my niche sites!